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Introduction

A state of unlimited freedom exists when human beings withdraw from the world

so that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning. In withdrawing,

human beings no longer recognise the world as a source of value. In our solitude

our freedom is absolute because inner freedom does not need to recognise

external constraints. No longer experiencing the world directly, man starts to

distrust everything outside his head. He withdraws into a world of his own

creation, thus adopting a nihilistic attitude, which denies the existence of the

world and all value within it. The problem for man is that if there is nothing to

prohibit actions, there is nothing to authorise them either, because no value can

be established outside of man. We must either accept these conditions or else

seek a new absolute within the world.

In this thesis I will show that unlimited freedom is a direct result of

nihilism as a theory and consequently that it leads to historicism1 as a practice. In

Chapter One I will outline the claims of nihilism, which says that man is alone in

the world and all morality is non-existent. I wish to examine further nihilism as a

process of evaluation that calls for ‘freedom from values’ in order for human

beings to be free to revaluate. Chapter Two examines the view that history can be

seen as a process of human self-creation and I will discuss the consequences of

this view of history as a man-made process. In Chapter Three I will provide an

existential response to nihilism and propose values that are trans-historical. I will

1 Historicism is the theory that events are influenced by historical conditions, rather than by people. It claims that history is

composed of an organic succession of developments that are influenced by local conditions and peculiarities and consequently that

social and cultural events are determined by history. As a practice, it places ideas within an historical context.

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show that limits can be found in the world and in the human, which is our

fundamental condition of existence in the world. In Chapter Four I will present

foundations for human freedom which consent to the relativity of our situations

and I will conclude that true freedom requires a constant participation in the

world by human beings and the recognition that every standard of values is

relative to human history. I will ground my argument in the existential value of

the world and human condition, in which human existence is limited by mortality

and bounded by its situation.

Chapter 1: Unlimited Freedom

As a consequence of withdrawing from the world and failing to recognise it as a

meaningful source of value, man removes all external limitations and experiences

the unlimited freedom of solitude. In this condition, nothing provides a limit for

human action except individual self-restraint. But since man has retreated into an

inner world of thought where nothing is prohibited and nothing assured, morality

begins to lose its ontological foundations. Man comes to doubt the validity of the

world and his existence and consequently, adopts the nihilist attitude that since

nothing is absolute and all existence is meaningless, everything therefore is

permitted.

In this chapter is will examine the consequences of withdrawing from the world

and concluding that everything is possible. Section one presents the two major

claims of nihilism, that man is alone and that morality is meaningless. Section

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two describes nihilism as an opportunity which frees man from all previous

values and restraints in order to provide possibilities for new valuation of the

world. In section three I will look at the development of the idea that nihilism can

be identified with the historical process itself, in which nihilism makes its

appearance as a transitional stage in the world for mankind. Finally in section

four I will focus on the problem of finding and maintaining a trans-historical

value, which can allow human beings to place a limit on history and conclude

that the conditions of human existence in the world provide a source of

unchanging value for man.

In Very Little … Almost Nothing, Critchley presents nihilism as a psychological

state, which is attained when we realise that “the categories by means of which

we had tried to give meaning to the universe are meaningless. This does not

mean that the universe is meaningless, but rather that the faith in the categories of

reason is the cause of nihilism. We therefore require new categories and new

values that will permit us to endure the world.”2 Human beings are thrown into

the world, and without those values which were posited in a ‘true’ and ‘eternal’

world, we are thrown back upon ourselves, having nothing but ourselves to guide

our actions. For this reason, with the knowledge that there is nothing beyond this

world, we must attempt to rethink the universe consistently without God. This

world, which is now the only world we have, seems absurd without our

traditional standards of morality, and consequently, each individual action cannot

2 S. Critchley (1997), Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London, p. 49.

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be judged either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In this sense it appears that everything is

permissible and nothing is limited.

In the wake of nihilism, when all values have been devalued and all

traditional morality gone, unlimited freedom appears as a reality in the world for

the first time. But unlimited freedom brings with it unlimited responsibility.

Therefore every time we act, we must look solely to this world and the conditions

of our existence within it, in order to derive an ethic3 for our actions which can be

recognised by every human being and which defines a limit for our freedom. In

order to understand the source of unlimited freedom we must examine the claims

of nihilism. Without the absolute foundations which had previously provided

security for man, man alone is now the sole creator of his values and purposes.

1.1 The Claims of Nihilism

Nihilism is the situation which is obtained when ‘everything is permitted.’ It

declares the solitude of all earthly creatures and the nothingness of all morality.

There is therefore a greater need for human beings to be able to relate to a

common value. Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that existence

is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. It is “the inability to

believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered,”4

which results from valuing higher, metaphysical things (such as God), that do not

in turn, value human or earthly things. However, a person who rejects God and

3 An ethic is a system of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct. It provides a standard for right and wrong behaviour

which guides individual action, or is representative of a specific culture, society, or group. 4 A. Camus (1971) The Rebel, Penguin, London, p. 59.

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the divine may still retain the belief that all earthly or human ideas are still

valueless because they were considered so in the previous belief system. There

are two types of nihilism; One form of nihilism arises from the premise that

‘everything is permitted’ and rejects all moral standards; another form is held by

absolutists who permit any means necessary in the name of some absolute end.

The decline in the authority of higher law, as well as a growing

disillusionment with scientific reason as a means of defining the ethical

foundations of political life, has fostered a growth of relativist, subjective

interpretations of political values. On the one hand it frees man from ideological

traditions but on the other it paves the way for nihilist ideologies. Hoy maintains

that a basic problem for man is “whether or not it is possible to give rational

meaning and value to his existence in an age where there is no longer confidence

that reason can establish absolute or objective truths.”5 It seems to follow that

with the death of God and all transcendent forms, all values are of human

creation, and from that one can conclude that everything is permitted and nothing

is prohibited. The death of God means there is no law superior to or apart from

man. Since nothing was left standing, the solution is either utter nihilism or

reconstruction from scratch. Therefore, it is necessary to create post-Christian

values in order to avoid the dangers of nihilism either by finding a new

transcendent absolute or by recognising the relativity of human values.

One reason to advocate a transcendent absolute is a desire to give a point

or purpose to the world and life. But with the ‘death’ of God man is alone and

without a master. Man must create both himself and his values. If we choose to

5 T. Hoy (Sep., 1960), Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, p. 573.

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look solely to man, the question remains: can man alone create his own values?

Nihilists generally assert that everything can be created, and consequently there

can be no innate humanness. Human beings are viewed as purely vital creatures,

driven by necessity and their behaviour. What is needed therefore is a sense of a

shared existence in the world and a common condition to which we can relate.

Myers suggests that the crisis of modern man is that if man creates

himself, then he has no ideal nature to realise. Since man makes himself, it really

does not matter what he does, “if there is no normative human essence, then there

is no moral standard by which individual lives or social structures may be

measured, condemned, or approved. On this view, it must be conceded that

everything is permissible.”6 Man is that being who transforms nature, and in

doing so, continually changes his own nature. If we make ourselves, “we can

undo and remake ourselves.”7 Therefore, if nature is the product of human work,

it cannot serve as the principle, standard, or objective measure for human

behaviour.

Nihilism is the basis of a naturalism which looks upon man as a purely

vital means, endowed with a rationality which is solely instrumental. Gurwitsch

and Hatcher believe that nihilism sees each man as “the product of the conditions

in which he lives” and that the result of “this conditioning is the fact that he holds

to this particular idea and embraces this particular conviction.”8 Hence, every

human activity is considered only in the light of its vital functions. Perceiving

man as a vital being makes it possible to deal with him more or less as one deals

with any other natural object. Men can be persuaded to accept certain ideas with

6 D. B. Myers (Dec., 1976), Marx and the Problem of Nihilism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 201. 7 K. Ameriks, ed. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, University of Notre Dame, p. 215. 8 A. Gurwitsch and A. Hatcher (Apr., 1945), On Contemporary Nihilism. The Review of Politics. Vol. 7, No. 2. p. 173.

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little or no consideration for the rightness of the actions or the truth of the ideas.

This is simply because one ‘insists on the vital nature of the human being’ and

‘contests the existence of such abstract ideas as truth and justice.’9

Nihilists hold the view that objective morality does not exist. To question

the existence of God leads inevitably to doubts about morality, because how can

there be a just God or an absolute standard for morality if human history is a

seemingly endless procession of injustice? Driver defines moral nihilism as “the

view that there are no moral facts. It is a metaphysical view about what is out

there in the world, about what exists or does not exist. Nihilism holds that moral

facts do not exist.”10 If all morality was merely provisional, Willhoite argues that

this would reinforce the principle that the end justifies the means, because if no

values transcend the flux of history, and if no one knows that history is

proceeding inexorably toward a future incarnation of virtue perfected in all

mankind, “who can adjudge one guilty if he employs any means – murder,

concentration camps, total regimentation of human lives – in passionate

dedication to the consummation of the glorious future?”11 If the only ethical

guide for choosing and justifying the means by which one must act and live is

determined in terms of the future, then history is simply a process of becoming,

directed towards a goal or an ideal. Therefore the good and the true become that

which survives the inexorable process of the history, in other words, the

‘successful’. Nihilism asserts that no action is logically preferable to any other in

regards to the moral value of one action over another.

9 Ibid., p. 183. 10 J. Driver (2007) Ethics: The Fundamentals, London, Blackwell, p. 170. 11 F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (Jun., 1961), Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion. The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. 14, No. 2, p. 407.

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The practice of nihilism may be defined in effect as “the substitution of

concrete things for abstractions.”12 The nihilist no longer clings to such

abstractions as truth or justice, having substituted things much more concrete,

like biological advantages, needs, desires and utility. The truth of an opinion is

decided by its usefulness and rewards. Therefore, to think like everybody else

becomes almost a moral duty and those who hold sanctioned convictions are

rewarded by society as proof that these convictions are true. In the absence of

morality, existence has no intrinsic higher meaning or goal. With this moral

relativism certain opinions are seen as useful while others are not because the

only interest is with their function. “Since everything is opinion, one opinion is

as good as any other; why not, then, prefer that one which is shared by everybody

… which is favoured by public opinion?”13 Since opinion is interchangeable, then

by acting on the basis of certain ideas one will obtain results. This is the ethic of

adjusting to the milieu, which elevates mediocrity as a measure of humanity.

Camus accuses the nihilists of yielding to death and despair, saying that

they saw “the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it.”

They never believed in the meaning of the world, and therefore deduced “that

everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to

one’s wishes.” 14 In the absence of any human or divine code, the nihilist readily

accepted despair. If I believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning so that we

can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible. The type of

freedom which comes from this logic therefore, sees the law of the world as

nothing but the law of force. From a nihilistic vision of history there is no kind of

12 Gurwitsch and Hatcher, On Contemporary Nihilism, p. 174. 13 Ibid., p. 175. 14 A. Camus (1961), Resistance, Rebellion and Death, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, pp. 27-8.

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transcendence. It dedicates itself instead to a perpetual struggle for power, which

is carried on through history. But what then is the genuine intellectual attraction

of holding a position that negates everything and affirms nothing?

1.2 The Attractions of Nihilism

Arendt sees the decline of tradition as a great opportunity for mankind “to look

upon the past with eyes undistracted by tradition,”15 with a directness which has

disappeared from the world. Nihilism affords us with a chance for revaluation

and with it a great sense of freedom in breaking from the past. Isaac shows how

Arendt welcomes “the demise of the props and crutches that have long sustained

political orders unable to stand without such supports,” but at the same time she

recognises “the need for some anchoring for human freedom.”16 Until new ethical

foundations are laid down, the old traditions become an impediment to new way

of thinking. Both Camus and Arendt saw a pressing need for new positive values

and principles that derive their justification from the world and the conditions of

human existence. Nietzsche too, saw nihilism as an opportunity that impelled

mankind to seek new values because in doing so, the “world might be far more

valuable than we used to believe.”17 For this reason he completely embraced

nihilism in order to bring it out of concealment.

According to Critchley, Nietzsche sees the cause of nihilism as “rooted in

a specific interpretation of the world”, that of Christianity, and that this

15 H. Arendt (2006), Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin, London, p. 28. 16 J. C. Isaac (1992), Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, Yale University Press, p. 105. 17 F. Nietzsche (1968), The Will to Power, (Ed. Kaufmann, Walter), Vintage Books, p. 22.

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“Christian-Moral interpretation of the world is given by a will to truthfulness, but

this very will to truth eventually turns against the Christian interpretation of the

world by finding it untrue.”18 When we come to realise that the Christian-Moral

interpretation of the world is deceptive because it concealed from us that true

origin of our moral values, our initial response is to declare all existence

meaningless, reduce everything to nothing, and start afresh. Nihilism therefore,

provides freedom from old values of society that had previously restricted many

possibilities and alternatives for human action. Without these restraints, human

beings experienced a new sensation of everything being possible.

For Woolfolk, one of the primary functions of culture prior to modernity

was “to close possibilities, to establish constraints upon the freedom of

experience, so as to insure a certain inner distance from the treacherous

involvements of living.” 19 In the initial conditions of nihilism there is a sense of

unlimited freedom. Without any values to define the world and human existence

in it, there seems to be an infinite number of possibilities because there are no

distinctions and no limits are defined. The traditional standards of society

provided a balance between what is forbidden and permitted, thus controlling the

problem of human ambiguity in the face of infinite possibilities.

Isaac shows that in an atmosphere in which all traditional values

evaporated, it became easier for people to accept patently absurd propositions. In

an uncertain climate “it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of

human values, and general amorality, because that at least destroyed the duplicity

18 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 7. 19 A. Woolfolk, (1986), The Artist as Cultural Guide: Camus’ Post-Christian Asceticism, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 47, No. 2, p.

95.

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upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”20 Those who conceded to

nihilism were oblivious to the practical consequences of their actions. In their

sheer delight they welcomed destruction and flaunted all previous standards,

thereby adding fuel to the fire. For many people, nihilism represented a complete

break from tradition and the prejudices of the past.

The great advantage of these transitional times for Camus is that “nothing

is true” and “everything is permitted”21, however this does not mean necessarily

that nothing is forbidden. On the contrary, the recognition of absurdity

constituted for Camus “a bitter acknowledgement that was binding, not

liberating.”22 Unlimited freedom brings with it, unlimited responsibility and it is

only with a sense of history, “of limits and opportunities, problems and

prospects, [that it is] possible to speak meaningfully about the proper ordering of

political life.”23 Throughout history values have changed according to the projects

and aims of human existence. In order to understand human history one must be

aware that human beings, by their very existence, must constantly evaluate the

world in order to define what we can and cannot do. Without value, the world

would contain no possibilities for becoming.

1.3 Nihilism, History and Values

Nihilism is the conviction that existence becomes meaningless and void when we

come to recognise that the highest values cannot be posited in a ‘beyond’ or an

20 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 95. 21 Camus, The Rebel, p. 58. 22 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 106. 23 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 18.

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‘in-itself’ of things that might be ‘divine’. It is the recognition that the

transcendent24 has lost its power over the determination of man. For Nietzsche, a

nihilist is someone “who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of

the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our

existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ‘in

vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the

part of the nihilists.”25 In Nietzsche, Heidegger defines nihilism as “the historical

process whereby the dominance of the transcendent becomes null and void, so

that all being loses its worth and meaning.”26 Ideals, principles, and values that

were set above human beings in order to give being as a whole some sense of

purpose and order, begin to devalue.

There is a three-step process of nihilism which constitutes the movement

of history itself. The first stage is “when we have sought meaning in all events

that is not in them. Thus a precondition for nihilism is that we seek a meaning in

all events; that is, in beings as a whole.”27 In positing a purpose for beings as a

whole, all becoming achieves nothing because it aims at nothing. In response to

this, nihilism’s second stage comes from our need for a sense of higher unity.

However, if underneath all becoming there is no supreme value or totality into

which the individual can submerge, then in order to remain certain of our own

value, man “must posit an uppermost value for beings as a whole. But if belief in

a unity that pervades reality is disappointed, this gives rise to the insight that

24 The transcendent when pertaining to God exalted above the universe, is the highest or uppermost position that is beyond the realm

of the senses. The transcendent is that which is above and beyond comprehension and therefore, free from the constraints of the

material world. 25 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 318. 26 M. Heidegger (1991), Nietzsche Vol. IV, (Ed. Krell, D.F.), Harper Collins, San Francisco, p. 4. 27 Ibid., p. 30.

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nothing is aimed at by any given act or deed.”28 Now only one escape remains for

man that is, “to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception

and to invert a world beyond it, as the true world.” With this the final stage of

nihilism, a “disbelief in any metaphysical world” emerges, which “forbids itself

any belief in a true world.”29 We are left with no grounds for investing some

value in the world, so we withdraw again and now the world seems valueless.

However, Heidegger shows that with the last stage of nihilism, “a peculiar

transitional stage emerges: first, the world of becoming – that is, life is lived here

and now, along with its changing realms – can no longer be denied as real; but,

second, this world, which alone is real, has at the outset no aims and values and

so is not to be endured.”30 What remains is a feeling of valuelessness, but the

universe of being, which exists in itself, still permits “an investing and

withdrawing of values.”31 With the decline of uppermost values the world itself

does not fall away but is “merely freed from the valuations of prevailing values

and made available for new valuation. Thus nihilism does not lead us into

nothing”32 because it provides mankind with the transition which is needed from

traditional values to the new conditions of human existence. In this way “nihilism

is no longer simply the powerless yearning for nothing … but is the very

opposite”33, calling for a break from traditional values in order for human beings

to be able to revaluate the world.

Nihilism is decisive for the future in the task of new valuation. In its

classical sense, nihilism “calls for freedom from values as freedom for a

28 Ibid., p. 33. 29 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 13. 30 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 34. 31 Ibid., p. 43. 32 Ibid., p. 27. 33 Ibid., p. 56.

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revaluation of all (such) values.”34 It is the process of uprooting all previous

values, thus obliterating history through a revision of its basic traits, and breeding

of a new need for values; a new world project. Heidegger recognises the need for

beings themselves to find a “new interpretation through which their basic

character may be defined in a way that will make it fit to serve as a principle for

the inscription of a new table of values and as a standard of measure for suitably

ranking such values.”35 Because the transcendent has been abolished only the

earth remains. It is necessary therefore, to posit a new essence for man. With the

revaluation of all past values, a challenge has been issued to men; that they raise

new standards which accommodate being as a whole.

Isaac asserts that, in “articulating a pervasive sense of the failures of

reason, nihilism’s absolute metaphysical revolt symbolises a crisis of value in the

modern world.”36 Nietzsche claims that morality previously protected life against

despair and the leap into nothing. It was morality which “guarded the

underprivileged against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a

metaphysical value,” and thereby shielded human beings from the most terrible

thought, that is “existence as it is, without meaning or aim.”37 To strengthen mans

voice and thus prevent the most extreme form of nihilism, a sense of an eternally

recurring meaninglessness, social values were erected over man as if they were

commands of God. They were taken as ‘reality’ and the ‘true’ world and

concealed from man “that it was he who created what he admired.”38 Willhoite

suggests that, sensing the explosive impact that a full awareness of this truth

34 Ibid., p. 5. 35 Ibid., p. 6. 36 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 93. 37 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 35-7. 38 Ibid., p. 85.

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would have upon mankind, Nietzsche sought “to transform the apocalypse which

would result into a renaissance, so that at least some men would respond

affirmatively and creatively to the question: Can one live without believing in

anything?”39

For Heidegger, nihilism is a “process of devaluation, whereby the

uppermost values become valueless”40 precisely because an aim is lacking. It is

the condition that arises when all prior aims of being have become superfluous.

As human beings, we are forever directed in the world towards something in

particular and hold it as an aim if we consider it worthwhile. For this reason, an

object is “capable of being a standard of measure only where such as values are

esteemed and where one values is ranked above or below another. Such

esteeming and valuing occurs where something matters for our behaviour.”41 In

order to define our position in the world, mankind must provide new limits and

possibilities by positing values which are based on an awareness that man is

compelled to perpetually assent to, and rebel against, something which he had no

part in creating. But in the eyes of a condemned man who refuses supernatural

consolation, what values remain?

1.4 History and the Problem of Values

Human beings, in their eternal need for the absolute validity of transcendent,

supra-historical values, turned to the concept of history as a totality in order to

39 F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (1968) Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought, Louisiana State University Press,

p. 106. 40 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 14. 41 Ibid., p. 16.

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escape the ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism’ of historicism. But if history is an absolute

movement then one phase of human becoming is no better or worse than any

other. When the single overriding value is absolute justice, one is not concerned

about the morality of one’s tactics because the end comes to justify the means.

From this point of view, a provisional ethic can be derived which consists of

nothing more than a doctrine of success, because if history is nothing but chance

and force and nothing has meaning, then any means is justified because the

success of an action is set up as an absolute goal. The only value that can allow

man to judge history, and thereby place a limit on it, must be trans-historical.

Value judgements are ways of summoning other people to take certain

attitudes towards things. They are the most meaningful of statements because

consciousness cannot begin to exist until it sets a limit to an object. “A

consciousness which constitutes everything,” but only as the intelligible structure

of all objects, “remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work

to perform.”42 History determines the time and space of individual events,

because it constitutes “the knowledge of single events, or the development and

description of the ‘because’ of a thing.”43 With the death of God, mankind

remains, and by this we mean the history, which man alone must understand and

shape. For Camus, “history alone offers no hope. It is not a source of values, but

is still a source of nihilism.” There is a possibility however, that man can at least

create values in defiance of history. Camus believes that thought which is derived

from history alone, like thought which rejects history completely, “deprives man

42 M. Merleau-Ponty (2006), Phenomenology Of Perception, Routledge, London, p. 32. 43 A. Stern (1962), Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, Mouton & Co.: The Netherlands, p. 105.

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of the means and the reason for living. The former drives him to the extreme

decadence of ‘why live?’ the latter to ‘how to live?’”44

In history we make choices of what we consider essential to our existence

in order to distinguish what is important and what is irrelevant. In order to do this

we must have a standard of values. But as our projects change, so too do our

values. Stern therefore, presents each individual as having a world of different

values, because the hierarchies of things and ideas conceived by men are

intimately linked with their actions. This inequality of rank among the value of

things is conditioned by the relation of the objects to the appreciating subjects

and the “positing of a value results when our whole personality and, especially,

our faculty of judgement adopts an attitude towards the different feelings inspired

by things and ideas.”45 Values do not exist independently of man. In fact, it is

only through valuing some things over others that history takes on a specific

meaning for human beings.

History cannot be considered a science; it cannot be free from values

because the concept of value enters the very definition of history. If you destroy

all values then all you can do is generalize history, and everything in general

aims at nothing in particular. The generalizing method of natural sciences is

exempt from values, but “the individualizing method of history is only possible

thanks to an evaluating approach to the objects.”46 If there are no supra-historical

truths and values able to serve as standards by which to judge the relative merits

of values created in the course of history, then all ideas and all values created in

44 Camus, The Rebel, p. 215. 45 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 102. 46 Ibid., p. 120.

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the course of history would be justified. It would be impossible therefore to

ascertain any progress in history.

For this reason, Hoy asserts that reducing every value to historical terms

leads to dire consequences, because if “good and evil are reintegrated in time and

confused with events, nothing is either good nor bad, but either premature or out

of date.”47 With this radically temporal view of man and values, history becomes

merely the continual transformation of nature with no standard by which to

measure and evaluate human becoming. Similarly Stern maintains that the

particular can become essential “only with respect to a value; without such a

relation to a value, the particular would lose all its historical interest and would

be nothing but an indifferent element of reality.”48 The identification of values

with the historical process leads to the logic that nature is the raw material of

history, to be worked upon, transformed, and mastered by men. The problem for

human beings is that, in having no absolute and acting into history; the sum of

their acts, they realise that they make themselves and their values through history

and that no trans-historical truths can exist.

Philosophy must deal with the conditions of human beings that are

situated in the world. Each conscious being must accept their mortality and these

basic conditions have not changed throughout history. For this reason, these

values which are linked to the invariable human condition have a claim to

universality. This is because as past evaluations, they will probably be

maintained in the future, and will thus remain trans-historical. It is here that we

may be faced with “a possible limit to historical relativism in the realm of

47 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577. 48 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 120.

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values,” because vital values, such as ‘health’ or ‘life’ are not due to an

unchangeable human ‘nature’ but rather, they are due to “the human ‘condition’

which remains identical with regard to life and death.” 49

In this Chapter I have shown that the nihilistic claims of unlimited freedom must

acknowledge a source of value in order to be able to begin new valuations. There

is a genuine attraction for nihilism because it provides an opportunity for man to

revaluate the world and discover in it a new, deeper meaning. I have presented

nihilism as a process of revaluation which not only forms the basis of history

itself but also presents a possible limit to history, a limit based on the relationship

between human beings and their values.

Chapter 2: Historicism

But what happens if man refuses to acknowledge the relativity of his values to

history? Man begins to look elsewhere for absolute authority, which is outside

himself but is still in the world. If man turns to history, which is the sum of

human deeds and actions, he threatens to undermine the only means that human

beings have of understanding of the world and the meaning of their actions.

Because human beings make both themselves and their history, there is a danger

that by taking history as an absolute outside the control of man, all that would

remain would be a world seen through the human mind. Therefore, if man

49 Ibid., p. 137.

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proceeds by acting into the world and creating processes, then any hypothesis

will become possible.

In this chapter I will examine the concept of history as a man-made process and

consequently the claim that because men change their environments and in doing

so change themselves, all thought is historical and is unable to transcend history

in order to provide a standard from which to judge history. Section one examines

the relationship between human nature and history, showing that human ‘nature’

is historically emergent and thus no one can give more than the truth of their own

existence. In section two I will focus on Hegel’s contribution to the growth of

history as source of absolute value and that therefore, there can be no extra-

historical authority above history. In section three I look at Marx’s development

of history as a process and his conclusion that the end comes to justify the means

if the future is posited as a goal. In section four I will examine the process

character of history in more detail, focusing on the consequences of man-made

processes and concluding in section five that the danger with the process nature

of action is that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning, and no

longer relies on the world.

Historicism is the very basis on which we construct our observations of socio-

cultural reality. It is an organically developed basic pattern which came into

being after the religiously determined picture of the world had disintegrated and

the enlightenment had destroyed itself. Throughout history there has been an

assumption that a natural and rational foundation underlies human values. The

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Stoics believed that universal reason was common to all men and that there was a

common understanding of ‘natural right’. In the Middle-Ages natural right was

solidly rooted in the divine law.50 ‘Just’ and ‘unjust’ were moral values because

they constituted the ethical minimum. But if this ethical minimum cannot be

guaranteed by natural right, then ethics is at the mercy of history and forced to

sanction all the values and laws of history. This would mean total victory for

Historicism.

After the climax of the French Revolution there was a reaction by German

Romanticism against the doctrine of natural right, which prepared the way for

Historicism. German Idealism distanced itself from the French Revolution by

attacking the infallibility of the rationality of man.51 It revealed that concepts such

as ‘human nature’, ‘justice’, and ‘reason’ were mere abstractions, detached from

concrete reality. The Idealists advocated the principle of man’s creative unreason

in which the inability to understanding man as a rational being became all

important. In Historicism, the common rational features of mankind that were

“supposed to be eternal, were superseded by those irrational vital forces which

are characteristic of each nation and are the product of a slow historical

revolution, of an organic growth, in the soil of tradition.”52 With the accelerated

change of modern dynamic social and political conditions, philosophy’s

traditional, static view of the world as a cosmos or fixed totality which had

endured since antiquity, collapsed.

However, what remained was a cultural need for orientation in the world,

as man looked to supra-historical ideals to which the secular could be relegated

50 Ibid., pp. 140-2. 51 Ibid., p. 145. 52 Ibid., p. 146.

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to virtual insignificance. It is for this reason that human beings sought out a new

absolute existing outside of man. Ameriks shows that with German Idealism the

meaning of history became fixed to a dogmatic and sacred interpretation. History

came to be seen not as an already established, fixed, reality but as an emerging

and self-ordering whole. God or the absolute was “conceived as nothing outside

or beyond this moral order of the world.”53 Thus the absolute was not seen as an

entity beyond the world, but an idea to be realised through history. This form of

historicism presented the modern concept of history; a process of never-ending

movement. But in order to get a better understanding of Historicism, “one has to

know the thesis which it denies; namely, natural right, and its presupposition, the

concept of a human nature or a human reason considered as unchangeable,

eternal, identical throughout the ages.”54

2.1 Human Nature and History

In the modern age, history has become an absolute authority for mankind. But

since history is the product of human actions in the world, whoever tries to

understand man, must first rid themselves of all stable concepts, and learn how to

think by virtue of dynamic concepts. Therefore, Stern shows that “every concept

which refers to a specifically human life is a function of historical time.” This is

pure Historicism, because “if our concepts are functions of historical time, then

there are no supra-historical stable concepts capable of serving as permanent

53 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 205. 54 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 139.

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standards of judging the concepts created in the course of history.”55 Having no

human nature, man is nothing but the sum of his acts.

According to Isaac, Arendt makes the distinction between the human

condition and human nature in that “the common condition does not constitute

anything like human nature” because “human existence does have distinguishing,

limiting features.” The conditions to which she refers “do not constitute essential

characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence

would no longer he human.”56 In other words these conditions of human existence

are not essences, and because they are historically emergent, there is no way for

philosophy to fix them once and for all. This does not mean however, that we can

know nothing about ourselves. There are conditions which frame our existence,

that enable and constrain us but which never condition us absolutely.57 Man can

only start from the historical situation into which he finds himself cast, to accept

it voluntarily, instead of allowing himself to be impelled by it or refuse it; “his

history, his previous experiences, together with his circumstances, constitute the

basic limitations of his future possibilities.”58

For Heidegger, there is no essential human nature. ‘Being-in-the-world is

a basic state of Dasein’,59 it is something which has always been experienced

ontically. Man in general does not exist. What exists is the man of a given

historical epoch with his historical and national environment. Stern examines

Heidegger’s claim that man is free, but that his freedom is limited because to be

“cast into the current of historical time is one of the fundamental unalterable

55 Ibid., p. 175. 56 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 108. 57 H. Arendt (1969), The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 11. 58 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 175. 59 M. Heidegger (1962), Being and Time, (Trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E.), Blackwell, Oxford, p. 86.

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features of the human condition. We cannot change this current. We have to

accept the historical conditions of our existence.” We may try to understand and

interpret these conditions, but that is all. Every interpretation is historically

conditioned however, since every truth is relative to existence. “Thus, no thinker

can give more than the truth of his own existence, which is historical. With this,

we have come to the core of Historicism.”60

2.2 Hegel’s Concept of History

History possessed an immanent cumulative significance for Hegel, through

which the individual could approach self-definition. Stern shows how this

interpretation of history “completely eliminated the concept of human nature.

What now appears to be man’s substance is the variable, that which changes in

the course of history.”61 Man has no ‘nature’ but he has a history. Consequently,

all that exists is historical man; a ‘son of his time’. For Hegel, “it is just as foolish

to imagine that any philosophy transcends its present world, as it is to believe

than an individual jumps out of time”62 All philosophy is its time expressed in

thoughts. No philosopher can lay claim to absolute truth because absolute truth

would be the end of history.

In On Revolution, Arendt states that “the most far reaching consequence

of the French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in

Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s truly revolutionary idea was that the old absolute of

60 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 173. 61 Ibid., p. 147, quoting from Hegel’s Samtliche Werke, (p. 52). 62 Ibid., p. 157.

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the philosophers revealed itself in the realm of human affairs”63 which had been

ruled out as the source or birthplace of absolute standards. The simple lesson of

history according to Grumley is that, that which “appears to be given, eternal, or

natural is in fact the product of human activity.”64 With the disappearance of the

transcendent values, man realised that he alone was the source of his values. He

is faced with two choices – look to man as the source of values or find a new

absolute outside of man to secure his values.

Hegel sought a new absolute in order to ground human values in a higher

meaning. Left with human existence in the world as a sole value, Hegel simply

proposed to make it absolute. He conceptualised it “in terms of an immanent

processual unity of both the natural and historical world,”65 thereby constructing

a framework which provided him with a coherent account of historic and social

divisions, and allowed him to interpret immanent and rational meaning behind

the appearance of chaos. For Hegel, “the realised purpose, or the existent

actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but it is just this unrest which is

the self.”66 Therefore, realisation of spirit’s full self-knowledge came to be

conceived as a single, unified, historical enterprise. In “anticipating radical

historical possibilities,” Hegel projected his vision of a unified and “harmonious

culture into an immediate future within the grasp of the revolutionary present.”67

With this new understanding of historical development he was able to transform,

what appeared to him to be a fragmented and disunited world, into the

progressive unfolding totality.

63 H. Arendt (2006), On Revolution, Penguin, London, p. 42. 64 J. E. Grumley (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, Routledge, London, p. 19 65 Ibid., p. 19. 66 G. W. F. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 12. 67 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 15.

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By withdrawing from the world and assuming the position of spectator,

Hegel was able to “perceive an essential rationality underlying the apparent

chaos of the new order.” This allowed him “to view diremption not as a

‘distortion’ of some ideal unity but as a moment or a phase in a totalising process

which overcame and encompassed it.”68 Once you look at history in its entirety

everything suddenly made sense. It seems that nature pursues its over-all aims

through men, of which they hardly give higher value to their own existence.

Modern ideological thinking devalues the present at the expense of the future and

for Arendt, this escape into the whole was prompted by the meaninglessness of

the particular.69

Hegel tried to escape the historical relativism resulting from his thesis

statement; that all knowledge is only its time apprehended in thoughts, by trying

to secure the extra-historical character of moral values. He concluded that the self

is “an absolutely free entity” and asserted that the “absolute freedom of all spirits

who bear the intellectual world in themselves, and cannot seek either God or

immorality outside themselves.”70 Therefore, he withdrew morality from history

and consequently history from morality, declaring world-history beyond the

reach of moral judgement and above obligations and self-interest. The result for

Ameriks, was that if the events of world history were understood to be “a

moment of coherent, intelligible, even rationally necessary development,” then

what is actual for Hegel, becomes rational and ‘what is rational becomes

actual.’71 With this conclusion, Hegel drastically opened the doors of Historicism.

68 Ibid., p. 17. 69 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 83. 70 G. W. F. Hegel (1998), The Hegel Reader, (Ed. Stephen Houlgate), Blackwell Publishers, p. 28. 71 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 182.

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According to Beiser, “instead of seeing natural law as an eternal law

above the process of history, Hegel historicises it, so that it becomes the purpose

of history itself. This then gives him an absolute standard by which he can

appraise all the different cultures.”72 The concept of ‘right’, when associated with

history, comes to be seen as basically an unwritten law sanctioned by usage. For

Hegel, if there is no human nature invariable throughout ages, then natural right

loses its ontological foundation. From the materialist conception, Sartre shows

that, “man returns to the very heart of Nature as one of its objects and develops

before our eyes in accordance with the laws of Nature.”73

But if Nature has no ‘will’, then consequently it cannot prescribe a

definite kind of conduct for human beings, because in starting from the facts of

what actually is one cannot infer what ought to be. Stern regards this as a serious

problem, because human reason can understand and describe but it cannot

prescribe. Therefore, “the belief that one can find norms for human conduct in

reason is the same illusion as the belief that one can draw such norms from

nature.”74 In history, facts are of interest to us for what they may have in common

with other facts but especially for what is specific and individual in them. The

reason for this is that “historical fact is the carrier of a specific value absent in the

natural facts which repeat themselves.”75

Hegel maintained that if history is the unfolding universal Reason in time,

then what is reasonable is real and what is real is reasonable. Thus ‘the real world

is as it ought to be.’ Here lies the justification for Stern, that “the consecration of

72 Beiser, F. C. Ed., (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press, p. 279. 73 J. P. Sartre (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, Verso, London, p. 27. 74 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 152. 75 Ibid., p. 112.

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all that history has brought forth” that what is real is “rationally necessary, and,

therefore, it does not need any further justification, be it a moral one or any

other.”76 Hegel’s dictum that universal history is the universal tribunal is the

keystone of Historicism. If there is no extra-historical authority above history,

then history is the supreme judge of all truths and all values. In this way history

results in complete amoralism, condemning to oblivion the very truths and values

it has produced.

According to Willhoite, in Hegel’s thought, all values lose eternal status

and are wholly incorporated into the flux of history, into the ‘becoming’ rather

than the ‘is’. But Hegel also asserts that “these principles will ultimately come to

full realisation in the course of the historical process; thus they become absolute

ends or goals and no longer serve as regulative criteria of means in the historical

present.”77 Hegel therefore, makes moral judgement in principle, impossible. For

him the good and true are only that which survives the inexorable dialectic

movement of history; in effect the successful. In saying that all morality is

provisional, Isaac shows that Hegel’s thought becomes “a form of nihilism,

embracing the destructive march of reason through human history and claiming a

privileged standpoint – the end of history”78 from which to judge it after the fact.

If one believes that history is proceeding toward a future incarnation of freedom,

then any means is justified which seems necessary in the present for the ultimate

realisation of man’s glorious destiny.

For Ameriks, a great deal in Hegel’s project depends on understanding

that the issue of objectivity, for “the problem of actual content, has ceased to be

76 Ibid., p. 159. 77 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 114. 78 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 81.

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an issue about the correct (clear and distinct) grasping”, and has become a

problem of legality, “of our being bound by a rule of some sort that prohibits us

from judging otherwise.”79 Nothing about our desires count as responsible for an

action occurring and if they do count, it is only because the subject has taken

them to count. It seems then that all decisions can be made completely

independent of the world. Throughout his work, Hegel often refers to objective a

priori judgements as ‘self-determining’, “as if any thinker’s attempt to represent

an object can be said to set its own rules.”80 Hegel calls this ‘free judgement’, in

which matter has its substance outside itself, “spirit, on the other hand, is self-

sufficient being, which is the same thing as freedom. For if I am dependent, I am

beholden to something other than myself, and cannot exist without this external

point of reference.”81 Intelligence for Hegel, is the mind “that withdraws into

itself from the object”82 and recognises its inwardness as objectivity.

2.3 Marx’s Concept of History

According to Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology contained “all the elements of

criticism concealed, often already prepared and elaborated in a way that far

surpasses Hegel’s own point of view.”83 In an attempt to find a supra-historical

value by which to judge the unfolding of history, Marx replaced Hegel’s spiritual

essence with the notion of human essence. This historical realisation of human

essence would culminate in the attainment of a universal value perspective from

79 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 186. 80 Ibid., p. 187. 81 Hegel, The Hegel Reader, p. 401. 82 Ibid., p. 316. 83 K. Marx (1977), Selected Writings, (Ed. David McLellan), Oxford University Press, London, p. 100.

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which to judge and condemn all existing social conditions. Grumley shows that

Marx constantly reiterated the view that human essence and human activity are

essentially historical because they are both “shaped by the reigning socio-

historical forms.”84

For Marx, human essence was the sum of productive forces inherited by

contemporaries as a legacy of humanity’s historical development and continuity.

The difference between Hegel’s idea of totality and Marx’s emphasis on the

dynamism of practical totalisation is the difference between the philosophical

assertion of “a meaning to history as a whole and the concrete strivings of a class

as they modified inherited social institutions and meanings,” 85 who make

conscious decisions about their present historical situation from the perspective

of its current social possibilities. Marx denounced the ideological character of

historical closure and posited the practical necessity of an unending struggle

leading to emancipation in the future as the goal of human history.

The limitations of Hegel for Marx, was that self-conscious man had

recognised the spiritual world “as self-externalisation and superseded it,” but had

nevertheless confirmed it again in this externalised form and declared it “to be

his true being,”86 thus restoring it. Mankind had tried to disguise from itself, that

it is man which is the sole creator of his values and purposes, simply because

such an acknowledgement would make man solely responsible for his actions.

Although Marx criticises Hegel for escaping into an absolute, he still preserved

Hegel’s progressive understanding of history. He adopted the view that the

totality of social relations is the bearer of a human essence that is fixed in its

84 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 45. 85 Ibid., p. 49. 86 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 106.

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social and cultural objectification. It was in so doing, that Marx disentangled his

philosophy from the existing world and established in it a future perspective.

Marx’s philosophy is seen by Ameriks as “taking over the most

fundamental philosophical project of German Idealism: the glorification of

human history as having a thoroughly dialectal shape in its development as the

complete and immanent fulfilment of self-consciousness.”87 He bestows upon

mere time-sequence an importance and dignity it never had before. Marx argues

that every process must have an agent; a subject, but this “subject only comes

into being as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absolute self-

consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the idea that knows and

manifests itself.”88 In this way, Marx presents human consciousness as a

completely self-knowing activity, which is capable of determining its own future.

Progress carried for Marx “a substantial prospective significance”, which is

derived from “a practical historical reflection primarily motivated by an

orientation to the future.”89

Arendt asserts that the danger of transforming the unknowable higher aims

into planned and willed intentions “was that meaning and meaningfulness were

transformed into ends.” When Marx took the Hegelian meaning of history as a

totality, freedom came to be seen as the “progressive unfolding and actualisation

of the idea of Freedom – to be an end of human action.”90 However, meaning can

only rise out of human deeds after action has come to an end, and therefore the

aim of today becomes the means of tomorrow. In this way, we overlook the need

87 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 273. 88 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 109. 89 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55. 90 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 78.

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for valuation in the here and now; the only hope for a life that is meaningfully

human. The chief characteristic of mean-ends category when it is applied to

human affairs is that the end is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the

means, which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since human action

can never be reliably predicted, the means used are often of greater relevance to

the goal of the future world than the present.

The turning point of world history for Arendt, is that “for the first time,

the history of mankind reaches back into an infinite past to which we can add at

will an into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead into an infinite

future.”91 History, by stretching into the twofold infinity of past and future, seems

to be able to guarantee immortality on earth. The great advantage to this concept

of the historical process is that it makes the very notion of an end inconceivable.

In its search for a strictly secular realm of enduring permanence, mankind

discovered a source of potential immortality, in which permanence is entrusted to

a flowing structure.

2.4 The Process of History

In Between Past and Future, Arendt claims that in the modern age history

emerged as something it had never been before. It was no longer composed of

human deeds, nor did it tell “the story of events affecting the lives of men.” It

had become “a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which

91 Ibid., p. 68.

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owed its existence exclusively to the human race.”92 The emphasis shifted from

knowledge of individual things to entire processes because nothing had meaning

in and by itself, not even history or nature.93 The concept of process implies “that

the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning,

have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it

happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and

significance.”94 The experience which underlies the modern age’s notion of

process sprang from the despair of never experiencing and knowing adequately

all that is given to man and not made by him.

The experiences of inner freedom always presuppose a retreat from the

world, where freedom is denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access.

Inwardness is seen as a place of absolute freedom. The Christian tradition

equated freedom with free will; a freedom between me and myself. The presence

of freedom was experienced in complete solitude, independent of the world and

others. Man began to distrust his senses when he withdrew from the world. He

concluded that in order to prove the physical, he would have to make it. Thus

knowledge began to be associated with man-made processes, rather than objects

or events in themselves.

Arendt insists that the first result of men’s acting into history is that

history becomes a process and by starting natural processes, “we have begun to

92 Ibid., p. 58. 93 In “Authority in the Twentieth Century”, Arendt examines totalitarian movements in greater detail, focusing on the movements

understanding of freedom. She says that “what they have in mind when they talk about freedom is the freedom of a process, which

apparently needs to be liberated from the meddlesome interfering activities of men, and what we have in mind is freedom of people,

whose movements need protection by fixed and stable boundaries of laws, constitutions and institutions.” (Pg. 409) According to

Arendt in “Ideology and Terror”, totalitarian societies do not operate without guidance of law, but instead dispense with human will

to action altogether and replace it with the law of permanent movement. Totalitarianism “executes the law of History or of Nature

without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behaviour.” (Pg. 307) 94 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 64.

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act into nature as we used to act into history.”95 Process is the inevitable result of

all human action, and like human action, it can never be entirely predicted or

controlled. We have manifestly begun “to carry our own unpredictability into

that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.”96 By carrying

our own actions into nature, we have blurred the boundaries and limits for human

action in the world.

Though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can

at least know what he makes himself. The mind can only know that which it has

itself produced in some sense within itself. In The Human Condition, Arendt

examines the process character of action, saying that as human beings, we

prescribe “man-made conditions to natural processes and force them to fall into

man-made pattern.”97 This enabled man to carry it, as it were, “within himself

wherever he went and thus freed him from given reality altogether – that is, from

the human condition.”98 For a moment we rejoice in a rediscovered unity of the

universe, but with the suspicion that we deal only with the patterns of our own

mind, which prescribes its laws to nature. According to Arendt, “what men now

have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds”99 and wherever

we go in the world we encounter only ourselves. How then are we to understand

the meaning of our actions through the course of history?

95 H. Arendt (Oct., 1958), The Modern Concept of History, The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 586. 96 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 61. 97 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 231. 98 Ibid., p. 285. 99 Ibid., p. 283.

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2.5 A Limit for History

For Arendt, if we assume that something like “an independent realm of pure

ideas exists, all notions and concepts cannot but be interrelated, because then

they all owe their origin to the same source: a human mind seen in its extreme

subjectivity.”100 In this way, thought can remain completely unaffected by

experience and hold no relationship to the world at all. What really undermines

the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole is

the fact that “we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence

of results in reality which not only make sense but work.”101 No question exists at

all which does not lead to a consistent set of answers. In this sense everything

which is ‘permitted’ in theory can now be actualised through history and made

‘possible’ in reality.

The observable fact is that the single occurrence has ceased to make sense

without a universal process. Any order, any necessity, any meaning that human

beings wish to impose will do. “It is as though men were in the position to prove

almost any hypothesis they might choose to adopt.” The paradox however, is that

man, whenever he tries to learn about things which “neither are himself nor owe

their existence to him, will ultimately encounter nothing but himself, his own

constructions, and the patterns of his own action.”102 In the course of consistently

guided action, any hypothesis will become actualised as factual reality. From the

100 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 69. 101 Ibid., p. 87. 102 Ibid., p. 86.

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moment it starts, the process of action will proceed to create a world in which the

assumption becomes self-evident and true.

For Arendt, “the modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to

a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the

processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-

made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it

were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one

over-all process,”103 history, which originally was conceived in order to give them

meaning. Thinking in terms of processes; we know only what we have made

ourselves, results in the insight that we can choose whatever we want and some

kind of meaning will always be the consequence. However, Arendt shows that

“the world of experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made

reality” and this “unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more

forcefully – into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he

himself created.”104

If there are no limits or moral boundaries to define a process of becoming,

all that remains is an endless natural cycle without any individual meaning. The

world in itself, without the limits and possibilities defined by freedom, would be

nothing more than an amorphous and unnameable mass. Merleau-Ponty claims

that freedom arranges for there to be possibilities and obstacles, but “it does not

draw the particular outline of the world,” it merely “lays down its general

structures.” It is freedom therefore, which “brings into being the obstacles to

103 Ibid., p. 89. 104 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 288.

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freedom, so that the latter can be set over and against it as its bounds.” 105 If

freedom conditions the structure of what ‘is’, it is present wherever these

structures arise. When freedom is devoid of any project and faced with unknown

obstacles, there is no possibility of choice and absolute freedom cannot choose

since it allows itself to be drawn in all directions. Merleau-Ponty therefore

concludes that it is not ‘outside ourselves that we find a limit for our freedom.’106

With history as a process, there is a greater insistence on an unbroken

continuity to history, however past values are not present values, and cannot

truthfully be understood from the premises of the present. As human beings we

are able make the reality “only from the viewpoint of possible fulfilment and

continued enhancement of the complex structure of already historically attained

human needs and capacities.”107 To make history is to impose upon reality the

preconceived meaning and law of man. Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical

Reason says that “consciousness can see the strict necessity of the sequence and

of the moments which gradually constitute the world as a concrete totality,

because it is consciousness itself which constitutes itself for itself as absolute.”108

At every moment of history, we can only have a historically conditioned view or

perspective of the mind’s systematic structure, because “in order to be able to

ascertain and to measure progress, one must have set up a standard of values.”109

In history every standard is determined by the point where the subject is

situated and it is from there that it originates. If we recognise that all values are

relative to our epoch then there appears to be no unquestionable standards by

105 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception, p. 510. 106 Ibid., p. 511. 107 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55. 108 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 22. 109 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 166.

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which to gauge our actions and consequently, we prepare the way for nihilism.

However, Stern believes that we do not need absolute values to escape nihilism,

because “we live in the present epoch and not in eternity”, and therefore, we may

“be satisfied with values valid for the present epoch.”110 Each new collective

project gives birth to a new code of values. By giving themselves new projects

and by imposing new norms upon themselves, a nation is able to create new

codes of values. It is the intrinsic directive value, “that is, the ideal affirmed in a

collective project,” which determines the whole system of “a nation’s radiated

values, gives a definite orientation to its instrumental values and impresses a

certain style on the evaluations of its members.”111 The most fundamental and

universal project which exists is the project of living. It is more fundamental than

all other projects because unlike them, “the human project of living does not

depend upon history but solely on the human condition, which is trans-

historical.”112 If we recognise that the human project of living is the a priori

condition of all other projects then we avoid Historicist nihilism. History can be

seen as the manifestation of a sequence of clashes between collective projects

and codes of values bound up in them.

The recognition of the human condition provides a limit for Historicism.

Stern suggests that there is no necessity for us to live without a belief in our

truths and values as long as we recognise our own standards as being relative to

our own epoch, because “it is in the very name of Historicism that we can insist

on the validity of our standards for our epoch and for our civilization.”113 Each

110 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 186. 111 Ibid., p. 226. 112 Ibid., pp. 242-3. 113 Ibid., p. 189.

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epoch creates its own standards and ideals, which open up roads of new

possibilities yet unrealised in history. The standards of values by which progress

is measured “have not stopped changing. They take the form of ideals, of

directive values and norms, which we carry in front of us while marching

through history. Mobile as ourselves, these standards always precede us.”114

Despite the plurality of the human condition, we have a deeper consciousness

which unites us and this in turn implies certain specific values. The human

condition is a constant in history – as long as men accept the conditions of their

existence they maintain certain fundamental evaluations of the world.115 They

hold values that are affirmed intrinsically in existence itself and in the project of

living common to all men. This establishes an objective limit to Historicism.

In this Chapter I have shown that by defining ourselves and our actions through

history, our human ‘nature’ can be seen as historically emergent and if man

becomes immersed in a totality of history, objective morality cannot be defined.

If human beings look to the process of history as absolute and outside

themselves, all that remains is a closed process, which functions independently of

the world and human deeds. With an escape into the absolute, the particular

becomes meaningless, because single events can no longer be understood in

isolation from history. It is the process as a whole which becomes meaningful.

114 Ibid., p. 193. 115 In “Practical Foundations and Political Judgement”, Biskowski focuses on the importance of the world in providing human

beings with orientation and meaning, saying that “the world provides action with context, meaning, a space to appear, and the

possibility of remembrance, as well as a common point of reference and orientation. When we lose contact with the world, for any

reason, we lose our sense of reality and our orientation in it.” (p. 881).

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Chapter 3: The Existential Response

In a world divested of a divine authority we have only our own existence to

ground us. We must look to this world and our human condition for the new

evaluation necessary to define the limits of our freedom. True freedom requires

the recognition that we are in the world and that there are definite things that we

can and cannot do. Maintaining an awareness of the conditions of our existence

and recognising that man alone gives value and meaning to the world is crucial to

our understanding of freedom.

This chapter focuses on the Existential reaction against a concept of history that

tries to dissolve the individual into a totality. In section one I will examine the

claim that man makes himself and his history and consequently, that man alone

can therefore define a limit for history. Section two looks at the sources of

meaning that remain for human beings after they have refused a higher

transcendent world, by focusing on their present situation in the world and their

adherence to the limits of their condition. In section three I will present the

argument that the conditions of existence in the world provide an unchanging

standard for human action. Finally in section four I will suggest that in focusing

on its affirmation of life and its perpetual struggle against death and injustice,

rebellion proves to be an enduring source of value for human beings.

The relationship of the individual to history is crucial to a fuller understanding of

freedom in the world. Olafson describes Existentialism as “a philosophy which

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[refused] to dissolve the individual,” and arose in response to Historicism. It was

Kierkegaard’s direct reaction against Hegel, whose modern concept of history

absorbed “every revolt and conflict and assertion of individual freedom into an

over-all, logical and necessary development.”116 Existentialism is a philosophy

which holds that the individual is defined or defines himself solely through the

free choices they make. It is the awareness of the absurdity of man’s situation,

which arises when man as an active being, confronts a world in which no over-all

rational pattern can be found. Nevertheless man is obliged by his ontological

structure to choose and act in the absence of any guiding principle to guide his

choice other than just the fact itself of being free.

Durfee emphasises that man asserts his presence in the world, that history

may set limits on man, “but it is also true that man in rebellion sets some limits

upon history.”117 For Camus, the act of rebellion is man’s “refusal to be treated as

an object and to be reduced to simple historic terms.” History is one of the limits

of man’s experience, but by rebelling, man “imposes in his turn a limit to history

and at this limit the promise of a value is born.”118 Camus asserts that he who

“dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is

nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he

builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from

it.”119 Camus believes that as human beings, we must recognise that life has an

intrinsic value that must be defended at all costs.

116 F. A. Olafson (Jan., 1955), Existentialism, Marxism, and Historical Justification, Ethics, Vol. 65, No. 2, p. 127. 117 H. A. Durfee (Jan., 1958), Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 38, No.1, p. 35. 118 Camus, The Rebel, p. 216. 119 Ibid., p. 266.

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Camus’s idea of rebellion affirms this value of existence, which is

recognised by every human being as a fundamental human value. “In rebellion

there is always one’s existence which is the very foundation for the rebellious

spirit.”120 It is precisely for this reason, that rebellion cannot offer a formal rule to

balance the insanity of history. The moral value brought about by rebellion is no

further above life and history than history and life are above it. It assumes no

reality in history until man gives his life for it or dedicates himself entirely to it.

However, the rebel is still able to set a limit on history, because in the act of

revolt, the rebel defies his unjust and incomprehensible condition and in doing so

affirms that life has a value for all people.

However, we cannot look on the invariable human condition as an

absolute limit for Historicism. For Stern, the human condition is “not a human

nature. While the latter was supposed to contain the universal, trans-historical,

eternal standards of all truths, all values, and all principles of right and morals,

the acceptance of the human condition by all men only throws into relief some

isolated trans-historical standards.”121 There exists therefore a human solidarity

which is opposed to death and suffering. A solidarity which is built around the

project of living that is common to all men. If we call this code of values basic

human ethics, it is because it refers only to the basic values of human existence:

life and health. These values are intrinsic to human existence and since they are

fundamental to human ethics they can also be seen as existential values.

Stern shows how Sartre’s Existentialism places two significant limits on

Historicism. First, that Sartre admits a kind of human universality under the name

120 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 35. 121 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 202.

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of ‘condition’, by which, Sartre “understands, with other thinkers, the totality of

a priori limits which circumscribe the fundamental situation of man in the

universe. The historical situations vary. What never varies is the necessity for

man to be in a world, to live, to act in order to maintain himself in existence.”122

Despite the non-existence of a human nature in the midst of a constantly

changing history, the human condition allows us to preserve enough human

principles to understand any human project. Even through the diversity of human

actions, each individual project is an attempt to overstep the limits of the human

condition and thereby motivated by the same aim. In asserting that the choice of

a free project is always socially and historically conditioned Existentialism finds

a second limit for Historicism. Stern believes that “our freedom in choosing our

projects, on which Existentialism insists so strongly, can be carried out only

within the framework of the naturally, economically, and historically given

possibilities.”123 By changing the present to build a new future, we create a new

history which situates us and envelops us. Essence is a timeless abstraction, but

existence is basically historical and therefore is always situated historically.

Jenkins sees the existential man as a creature that must “satisfy the

objective conditions of life, but who encounters real subjective alternatives in the

way he can satisfy them.” In this way “values become both reports of conditions

that life imposes and expressions of the individual’s response to these

conditions.”124 If we look for a general overall meaning for the world, a meaning

that is not motivated by any particular project, we will be unable to find a

specific aim. Meaning can only mean something for an individual in a particular

122 Ibid., p. 178. 123 Ibid., p. 180. 124 I. Jenkins, (Sept. 1950), The Present Status of the Value Problem, The Review of Metaphysics, p. 109.

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situation. Stern claims that by starting with existing man, “Existentialism has

been forced into Historicism,” because existential man always exists at a certain

moment. By insisting that man is in the world and thus always existing at a

certain place and always situated historically, Existentialism defies the classical

concept of man in general who is “timeless, spaceless, extra-historical man, a

man without a world: in short, an abstraction.”125

Lichtheim says that philosophy must think about man and his position in

the world, because “man is an historical being, and his situation is constantly

changing; hence the only kind of thinking that can interpret his role is historical

thinking, which however is itself subject to change and cannot rise above the

horizon of its particular epoch.”126 Here Existentialism comes into its own,

because the historical process itself is the process of man’s self-creation, and

therefore, what man experiences in history is simply his own being as it comes

back to him mediated by the time-sequence. The same thinking that reveals the

logic of history at the same time makes transparent the ontological structure of

human existence. In the same act, man creates both himself and his world. For

this reason, there is nothing behind history, neither God nor Nature and therefore,

all that is needed for a better understanding of history “is the awareness that it

has the world of history and can never cease to project itself forward in an

endless quest for a union that cannot be attained.”127

Consciousness represents the element of freedom, because through it the

future is already present inasmuch as men are able to throw off the deadweight of

past historical accretions. Lichtheim declares that “we anticipate the future by

125 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, pp. 172-3. 126 G. Lichtheim No. 2, (1963), Sartre, Marxism, and History, History and Theory, Vol. 3, p. 244. 127 Ibid., p. 245.

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shaping our circumstances in accordance with our desires. The element of

freedom – deliberate choice – is embedded in the time-sequence inasmuch as

men relate themselves consciously to their future as well as to their past.”128 Man

defines himself by his projects and these acquire a practical content if it can be

shown that the historical process is kept going, by a dialectic ends and means that

is both imposed and willed. In this way, all action must conform to some degree

with our estimates of the future otherwise it would be utterly irrational and

chaotic.

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre states that “if God does not exist,

everything would be permitted.” This is the starting point for existentialism,

because without the existence of God or any transcendent absolute, we are not

provided with any values or commands to legitimise our behaviour. “Thus we

have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means

of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse.129

Likewise, Wood

maintains that men make their own history, “but they do not make it just as they

please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under

circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”130

Human beings create themselves and their values through history, shaping the

world through their projects and providing a limit for their actions by drawing

from the world. In this way, they define the world and give it meaning.

128 Ibid., p. 231. 129 J. P. Sartre (1989) Existentialism and Humanism, (Trans. Philip Mairet), Methuen, London, pp. 33-4. 130 P. Wood (1985), Sartre, Anglo-American Marxism, and the Place of the Subject in History, Yale French Studies, No. 68, p. 15.

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3.1 Sources of Meaning

The absurd situation arises out of the polarity between man and the universe. It

arises out of man’s desire to give meaning to the world and the awareness that

the universe in itself is without point or purpose. It is the awareness that there is

no final resolution, because man is always in the process of becoming. Realising

that no final synthesis is an attainable, the act of rebellion becomes the only

meaningful course of action for human beings. In rebelling against the absurd

condition of their existence, human beings are able to find a source of meaning in

the world.

Without rebellion, the absurd condition can lead to nihilistic conclusions.

As Camus writes in The Rebel, “if one believes in nothing, if nothing makes

sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and

nothing is important.” The sense of the absurd makes murder seem a matter of

indifference and hence, permissible. Indifference to life is a mark of nihilism and

having no higher value to direct our action, human beings aim at efficiency,

because since nothing is true or false, good or bad, human ‘principles will

become that of showing ourselves to be the most effective.’131

Camus presents the human condition as an encounter with absurdity and

concludes therefore that life provides an absolute value, since the preservation of

life is necessary to maintain the absurd polarity between man and the world.

Willhoite however, shows that the absurd condition was “always nothing but a

point of departure” for Camus; “a place where, bereft of convincing transcendent

131 Camus, The Rebel, p. 13.

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meanings or imperatives, he felt compelled to take his stand before setting out to

chart a path to authentic human existence.”132 For Hoy, Camus is led to the

recognition that “from the moment that life is recognised as good it becomes

good for all men.” Human life is the only good, since “it is precisely life that

makes the absurdist logic possible, and since without life, the absurdist wager

would have no basis.”133 It is the world which provides a source of meaning for

human action, because to be human is “to experience and to defy absurdity, to

demand that the world be intelligible, that it affirm a sense of meaning.”134

For Camus the act of rebellion is a demand for meaning in an unjust and

irrational universe. Confronted with an incomprehensible condition, it is “a

demand for clarity”, in which the rebel expresses an aspiration for order by

attacking “a shattered world to make it whole.”135 Rebellion for Goodwin is the

demand of human beings for “order in the midst of chaos.”136 In his perpetual

demand for unity, the rebel’s fight against death amounts to claiming that life has

a meaning. “Every rebel therefore pleads for life and affirms that rebellion is the

only value which can save them from nihilism.”137 This passion for order

disclosed in the act of rebellion, sets a limit to man’s acceptance of oppression by

disorder or injustice. It involves not only the rejection of the lack of order of the

world, but it also conserves and augments other aspects of reality, such as the

common human dignity disclosed by the rebellion. In this way, it is the existing

conditions of the world which determine its new meaning.

132 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 27. 133 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577. 134 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 120. 135 Camus, The Rebel, p. 29. 136 Ibid., p. 16. 137 G. A. Goodwin (Mar., 1971), On Transcending the Absurd: An Inquiry in the Sociology of Meaning, The American Journal of

Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5, p. 838.

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Hochberg suggests, that since “the world is the only one Camus

comprehends and its joys and values the only ones he grasps, he can only be

satisfied with giving the world, somehow, an intrinsic value.”138 For Camus, man

comprehends only what he experiences, therefore he must seek some means of

anchoring his values in the world of experience. Values must come about from

the factual condition of the world as it is and without the otherworldliness of

transcendent values, man is left with this world and this life as sole possible

sources of value. Throughout his life, Camus maintained the simple position of

attempting to remain faithful to the concrete foundations motivated by human

existence in the world.

There is a discernible development throughout Camus’s life in his

understanding of the human condition. For him, the world remains the sole

source of meaning, and because of this, he maintains a total adherence to the

‘this-worldliness’ of life. This can be seen in man’s constant rebellion against

suffering and death. Throughout his work, the fundamental value of life remained

the sole value. Camus maintained that there is no superhuman happiness or

eternity outside of time where man can possess ideal truths. Because of his

intense existential concern with his own knowable bodily existence, Camus

refused to believe in the reality of any life other than the present earthly

existence. There is a certain ‘pointlessness’ to the problem of immortality

because for him, human beings are only interested in their destiny before, not

after.

138 H. Hochberg (Jan., 1965), Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, Ethics, Vol. 75, No. 2, p. 90.

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For Camus, a “purely historical absolute is not even conceivable” in

reality, since man lives in the midst of this totality he cannot grasp it. For this

reason, history as an entirety can only exist “in the eyes of an observer outside it

and outside the world.”139 Thought is always out in front and sees further than the

body, but the body lives in the present and is determined by its finite situation.

for this reason, Camus does not want to turn his back on his present riches. He

refuses all the ‘later ons’ of the world insisting that “even if I wished it, what

have I to do with any truth that does not decay? It isn’t cut to my dimensions.”140

In the refusal of the future, accepting of the present becomes all important, but

only on condition that man should always remain faithful to the present and

endure each experience with complete lucidity.

Hoy maintained that Camus’s argument remained quite simple: “We must

live with what we know. We cannot escape into faith.” Because of this, we are

called upon “to adopt the logic of the absurd man, who is conscious that reason

cannot give him certainty, but also insists that he must live without appeal.”141 If

we decide to live, it is because we find some positive value in our personal

existence. In each case however, the values are not given and have to be deduced

from the conditions of living. Camus denied all transcendent sources of value and

found instead “a basic value, one created by man.” With this value he attempted

“to construct an ethic and repudiate nihilism.”142 This life is all we have and

139 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 109, quoting from Camus’s The Rebel (p. 189). 140 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 21. 141 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 580. 142 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 93.

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because of that, the rebel’s ethic must be one of ceaseless opposition against the

absurd world, through which ‘the absolute value becomes opposition to death’143

Life itself proposes an ethics of choice and limitation. If a limited future

does not render life meaningless, it is because Camus is a man of the present. He

realises that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”144

His attitude comes from nothing more that a total and uncompromising

adherence to the sole dimension of time we have elected. Far from being an

ethics of passivity, it demands a constant awareness to the present. For Camus, a

threatened future adds all the more value to present life. In Letters to a German

Friend, he states that he chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world,

saying: “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I

know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only

creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our

task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And it has no justification but

man.”145

3.2 A Sense of Limits

Since human beings are left with the world only as their sole source of meaning,

they must find and define the limits of that world. Camus claims that in the past,

the Greeks took refuge behind the conception of limits, in which they negated

nothing and thereby never carried anything to its extremes. Modern day Europe,

143 Ibid., p. 99. 144 Camus, The Rebel, p. 268. 145 Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, p. 28.

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on the other hand, “negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her

diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason. In

her madness she extends the eternal limits.”146 Willhoite appears to agree with

Camus in saying that it was Christianity which “turned man away from the

world” and reduced him “to himself and to his history.”147 Human beings, in no

longer sharing the world, extended their thought beyond the limits of immediate

experience and began to make the demands of nihilism. This is because when

reason is “released from ascetic limitations in the personality”, it edges towards

“an inner world in which everything is possible and nothing is true.”148

Camus possesses a strong sense of the limits and a clear understanding of

individual human responsibility, because for him “the absurd does not liberate; it

binds. It does not authorise all actions.”149 He rejects all moral absolutes because

he does not view the present as a corrupt and incomplete moment which points to

something beyond itself. Willhoite examines Camus’s denial of ‘a life beyond

earthly existence’, which allows him to set forth “a new system of beliefs and

acts of faith. Far from negating all transcendence, he gives back a structure to a

sunken world limited by man, but a place wherein things take on meaning.”150

Roth claims that “the root of the matter lies for Camus in the self-discovery by

the individual that his claim is not for total liberty” but that “there is in each of us

a consciousness of limit, a limit which we cannot overstep without contradicting

146 A. Camus (1975), The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Penguin, London, p. 167. 147 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 116. 148 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 107. 149 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, pp. 98-9. 150 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 52.

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our nature.”151 The freedom asserted by rebellion is always a never wholly

successful attempt to liberate oneself from necessity.

For both Arendt and Camus it is human existence which presents the most

profound limits. They argue for an ethical and political conduct which is

constrained by our existence because it is our ‘common human condition, which

makes a politics of human rights imperative.’152 The conditions of human

existence are inherently limited because all life is bounded by birth and death.

The frailties of the human condition can either be exploited by ideologies that

seek forcibly to transcend human limits or can be sustained by healthy, self-

limiting forms of individual and collective autonomy.

According to Hochberg, the human condition of mortality sets a limit to

our existence and it is for this reason that Camus aims to face the actuality of the

present, in order to recognise in it all its possibilities and limitations without

reverting to faith in transcendent and absolute values. For Willhoite, an absolute

unshakable foundation is meaningless for human beings, simply because each

man is imprisoned in the conditions of his own existence. The question of the

meaningfulness of life as a whole is pointless because a man who is “indifferent

to imposed meanings and ignorant intellectual puzzles finds a strange immediate

communion with an impenetrable and equally indifferent world.”153 Metaphysical

freedom is of no concern to the absurd man. Because it “is irrelevant to one who

believes neither in a God who controls his actions nor in an after-life in which he

will be judged according to the use he has made of his capacity for free

151 L. Roth (Oct., 1955), A Contemporary Moralist: Albert Camus, Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 115, p. 301. 152 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11. 153 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 43.

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choice.”154 Though we can’t escape death, we should not accept it and for this

reason we should rebel. In refusing to evade the reality of our fate and our

condition we are drawn nearer to the world.

For Camus, the rebel rejects the consequences implied by death because in

rebelling, he does not ask for life but only for reasons for living. “If nothing lasts,

then nothing is justified: anything that dies has no meaning. To fight against

death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for

unity.”155 For the rebel, what is missing from the suffering and happiness of the

world is some principle by which that can be explained and justified. With an

existential awareness of death, there is no point in living for some future reward,

for the ‘later ons’ of the world. Under the weight of such awareness, human

beings have a need to take an unjustified leap into some transcendent principle in

order to give life the appearance of meaning. An absolute provides man with a

means of comprehending the absurd and giving life an overall coherent aim.

According to Nietzsche, “the nihilistic question of ‘for what?’ is rooted in

the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from

outside – by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still

follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally

and command goals and tasks.”156 Human beings have a constant need to ground

their values in some form of unquestionable absolute, in order to provide them

with meaning and orientation in the world. Willhoite warns against this tendency,

saying that “those who set out the premise of a limitless human freedom … seek to

154 Ibid., p. 32. 155 Camus, The Rebel, p. 73. 156 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 16.

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actualise their boundless freedom by aligning themselves with a movement

which claims the authorisation of history for it exercise of total freedom.”157

Camus was unable to discern a divine order outside of existence that could

provide a transcendent meaning and make human life ultimately coherent. He

concluded therefore that there were “no laws or norms accessible to man through

revelation or from nature to govern the manifold complexities of his existence.”158

This does not mean however, that there are no valid standards for the conduct of

life discernible to man. According to Peyre, one must accept the unintelligibility

of the world and pay attention to man in order to lead into a realm of human

significance. But the question remains; “What are the positive values which

persist in this world of mortals sentenced to death?”159

3.3 Sources of Value

Camus’s concept of rebellion reinforces his fidelity to the human condition, and

it is this that remains a fundamental value for him. Each man must be

continuously aware that life has no significance that transcends the particular

moments in which he lives it. Thus, by being fully involved and committed to the

world, the rebel is able to respond to each situation in which he finds himself.

Willhoite shows that rebellion “keeps continuously alive an awareness of the

absurd,” which requires a wholehearted “embracing of life, a perpetual struggle

157 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 92. 158 Ibid., p. 49. 159 H. Peyre (1960), Camus the Pagan, Yale French Studies, No. 25, p. 25.

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against death.”160 In doing so, it provides a standard of value for Camus because

of its intensely personal reaction to the existentially realised fact of mortality.

Rebellion must embrace life as its only foundation because without it, the rebel

would be unable to assert any principles.

The act of rebellion affirms values while limiting reality. The slave in

rebelling defines a limit for suffering and in so doing he discovers something of

value within himself which is identical with something of value within other

men. There is universality to cultural values in that, “what is historically essential

must not only be essential for this or for that individual, it must be important for

all.”161 The act of revolt appears to precede the conscious formulation of values,

because in his refusal, the rebel affirms certain human rights and values that must

be defended.

According to Durfee there is a common humanity implicit in the act of

rebellion which is always a value. Rebellion offers “a rule of conduct which does

not need to be endlessly projected into the future; nor is the rule merely a formal

ethical principle without immediate relevance to the historical situation.”162 As a

value it exists here and now and provides the basis of our protest against

injustice. The act of revolt uncovers this universal value which is crucial for a

shared understanding of the world. Roth shows that for Camus, “if men cannot

refer themselves to a common value, then man is incomprehensible to man. The

rebel demands that this value be clearly recognised in himself because he

160 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 37. 161 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 122. 162 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 36.

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suspects, or knows, that, without this principle, disorder and crime would reign

over the world – it is the aspiration to an order.”163

In this Chapter I have provided the Existential response to Historicism, which

asserts that man makes himself and his history and therefore, it is man alone than

provide a limit and a meaning for history. Existentialism agrees that human

nature is historically emergent, however it maintains that if man looks to his

present situation in the world, to the ‘here and now’, and continues to remain

faithful to the origins of rebellion, then he is able to derive an ethic from his

actions.

Chapter 4: The Foundation of an Ethic

In this chapter I will examine the foundations that are necessary for freedom to

appear in the world, emphasising that these conditions must remain continuously

open to the future and consent to the relativity of human existence. Section one

focuses on the Existential response to the nihilistic claim that man is alone in the

world, which emphasises the importance of human participation in the shared

struggle against death. Section two presents the claim that, in realising that

human beings make themselves, man becomes solely responsible for his actions

and decisions because there is no transcendent principle in which he can take

refuge. In section three I will focus on a conception of limited freedom,

presenting the claim that although everything is permitted, it is only by accepting

163 Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 299.

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new obligations and maintaining a fidelity to the world that we derive a sense of

freedom and that this involves making choices and limiting our options.

What then is needed for forging a more just and meaningful life? Isaac says that

“we need, in short, to ground, and thus to limit, our conduct, seeking foundations

at the same time that we acknowledge their provisional character.”164 Therefore,

there must be an awareness that human values are relative to the conditions of

existence and likewise that the foundations that arise must accommodate the

dynamic nature of human beings. Stern claims that “if all values, all norms and

standards were trans-historical and eternal, this would be tantamount to a total

inertia of mankind’s axiological consciousness.”165 Human beings by their very

nature are constantly involved in the world, and history is that constant process

of valuation and revaluation by human beings, according to their ever-changing

aims and projects. Values are appreciated throughout history and each one makes

its claim for universal validity, however, the individual that acts and the history

which gives an account of him “cannot be understood without the relativity of

values.”166 Since no values appear to be free from these historical conditions,

there can be no trans-historical standards that allow us to judge the truths and

values created throughout history.

For Camus, the world appears meaningless because there is no absolute,

but in another sense, there can be no absolute since such a thing would be

meaningless to the conditions of the world. Nietzsche supports this view by

saying that “the unconditional, representing that highest perfection, cannot

164 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 110. 165 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 194. 166 Ibid., p. 137.

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possibly be the ground of all that is conditional.”167 Existence in the world invites

human beings to act but it also makes the future indeterminate and the ultimate

consequences of their acts unknowable. Arendt likewise, reinforces this view by

saying that “laws residing on human power can never be absolute.”168 The

‘inauthoritive authority’ of rebellious politics places it on shifting sands rather

than solid rock. It still remains a stable and lasting authority however, because it

is grounded in our timeless condition of being rebellious and limited creatures.169

According to Goodwin, “the absurd is never overcome – all that occurs is

the creation of new theses which in turn have their own contradictions. A

meaningful existence, then, could become one of continual rebellion.”170 The

continual fight for order and unity is testimony that life has meaning, and for this

reason, Camus sought to derive an ethic from rebellion because it defines the

limits beyond which we cannot go. Because of this, it is absolutely necessary that

rebellion derive its justifications from itself; to study itself in order to learn how

to act. Through rebellion we may perhaps discover the rule of action which the

absurd could not give us. By Camus’s reasoning, it is not the knowledge of the

absurd that distinguishes man, but rather the rules of life and of action that he

derives from this truth. “Unless we ignore reality, we must find our values in it.

Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and of

absolute values? That is the question raised by revolt.”171

167 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 15. 168 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 132. 169 For further discussion on the topic of freedom and foundations, see Keenan’s “Promises, Promises: The Abyss of Freedom and

the Loss of the political in the Work of Hannah Arendt”, which examines the possibility that “freedom can only gain a foundation or

a space, or become a law for a particular group of people, by taking on a specific, limited form; the foundation, to make certain

options possible, will have to close down certain others: future possible new beginnings will be restricted and others ruled out

entirely.” (Pg. 315) 170 Goodwin, On Transcending the Absurd, p. 837. 171 Camus, The Rebel, p. 27.

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For Camus, the rebel slave says yes and no at the same time. “He affirms

that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the

existence of certain things beyond those limits.”172 Thus in the act of rebellion,

the rebel implicitly brings into play a standard of values that he is willing to

preserve at all costs. The moment he rebels, he begins to consider things in

particular and his situation becomes defined by new values. In order to exist, man

must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits

where minds meet. Camus presents rebellion as the common ground on which

every man bases his first values. In saying ‘I rebel – therefore we exist,’173 he is

led to an ethic of openness and participation in the world with others. Rebellion,

though it springs from an individualist impulse, questions the very idea of the

individual through the rebel’s willingness to subordinate his personal life to a

common good. Therefore, the act of revolt provides us with a ground for human

ethics because in our awareness of the common condition of men, we derive a

minimal evaluative standpoint from which to establish a stable foundation.

For Willhoite, before ever reflecting on the most fruitful ethic for action,

human beings must first fully and openly encounter life in existential awareness

and find it to be essentially good and meaningful. Otherwise, “ethics can all too

easily become a closed system increasingly isolated from experience and inspire

fanatical efforts to crush human realities inconsistent with the reign of abstract

ideals.” One must love life before loving meaning because “when the love of life

disappears, no meaning consoles us for it.”174 Critchley agrees that one must

embrace life here and now, otherwise in our solitude and isolation, the highest

172 Ibid., p. 19. 173 Ibid., p. 28. 174 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 99.

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thing upon which we can contemplate is nothing more than the “empty and pure,

naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom.” 175 Left with nothing more

than ‘rational self-contemplation,’ rationality becomes a curse and we come to

deplore our existence.

4.1 Solitude and Participation

It is for this reason that Isaac emphasises the movement beyond solitude which is

entailed in rebellion and consequently, that dialogue and communication become

central to the formation of human values. Human freedom requires that

communities “establish conditions whereby ethical standards and public policies

can be collectively agreed upon rather than arbitrarily imposed.”176 However,

these foundations can only ever be provisionally given. For this reason these

conditions are forever dissonant and strange because “between the certainty I

have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will

never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”177 Human natality and

rebellion furnishes us with the first principles of ethical construction, because

they always remain open and alive to the continuous process of revision,

responding to the changes of each situation in the world.

For Isaac, Camus saw rebellion as the “passionate affirmation of human

value” because it referred “the exercise of human freedom, to the fact that

humans are agents always capable of surpassing or at least distancing themselves

175 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 4. 176 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 124. 177 Ibid., pp. 124-5.

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from their existing circumstances.”178 He makes the transition from solitary revolt

to a shared struggle because the act of revolt implicitly affirms a shared value

and dignity. Willhoite also shows that Camus saw with increasing clarity that

being human “requires broadening one’s rebellion so that it encompasses

resistance to forces which threaten the lives of [other] men and not merely

oneself.”179 For this reason, through rebellion, Camus places a greater emphasis

on participation instead of solitude, thus shifting from a primary concern with the

situation of the lone individual to that of the community.180

Honeywell shows that Camus, in his focus on rebellion, moves beyond

mere personal experience to a fuller understanding of freedom that requires the

shared participation of society. In this way “unity among men exists as a tension

or balance maintained by the mutual limitation of freedom and justice; it thus is

based on a freedom and a justice which are always relative, never absolute.”181

Rebellion is never a claim to absolute unity because it only ever aspires to the

relative. The freedom to rebel requires that no one system of justice is taken as

final or absolute. It emphasises a type of unity that involves plurality, because it

“provides a framework within which each man’s passion for order, operating in

its unique perspective, can contribute to the whole, thus a framework in which

rebellion can result in fruitful action – the creation of order out of disorder by

each man, the activity which marks his human nature.”182

Rebellion is the recognition of the positive value of creative freedom

while at the same time, recognising the limits of this freedom. This limit comes

178 Ibid., p. 73. 179 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 51. 180 For a more detailed discussion on the importance of participation and its relationship to freedom in the world, see Kateb,

“Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt”. 181 J. A. Honeywell (Jul., 1970), Revolution: Its Potentialities and Its Degradations, Ethics, Vol. 80, No. 4, p. 256. 182 Ibid., p. 257.

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from an awareness of other human beings and their capacity to rebel. For Hoy,

rebellion “supposes a limit at which the community of man is established. Its

universe is the universe of relative values.”183 Rebellion therefore provides human

beings with a freedom which is relative, both to the world in which we live and

the conditions that we share. According to Durfee “man’s solidarity is founded

upon rebellion, and rebellion can only be justified by this solidarity, [because]

with rebellion this estrangement of the self from the world is seen as a collective

experience.”184 Thus there is a need for human beings to find a common value in

their existence that can be maintained and defended.

In The Rebel, Camus asks the question ‘why would a person rebel if there

is nothing worth preserving in themselves?’ For him, it is a question of whether

or not a human ‘nature’ can exist, since rebellion, though “apparently negative

since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man

which must always be defended.”185 The individual is not the embodiment of the

values they defend. All humanity is needed to comprise those values and

therefore, when man rebels he comes to identify himself with other men. Thus

the ‘All or Nothing’ attitude of rebellion undermines the very conception of the

individual, who actually consents to die and be sacrificed for the sake of a

common good which he considers more important than his own destiny. The

rebel acts therefore, “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate

but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.”186

183 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 578. 184 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 33. 185 Camus, The Rebel, p. 25. 186 Ibid., p. 21.

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Man’s values appear therefore to be derived from his essence rather than

his existence. Like Camus, Hochberg holds that there is a human essence which

is presupposed by the rebel’s value and that this value emerges from man’s

existential condition. Both universals and values are spoken of as “transcending

individuals”, which provides part of “the bridge whereby Camus proceeds from

the premise that one rebels for values to the conclusion that there is a universal

human nature.”187 Likewise, Roth asserts that we rest in the position that there is a

limit in all things, and that “there is a limit restraining the relations between man

and man. For the limit we recognise in our own selves we recognise to exist in

others, so that we see in them too, just as in ourselves, a limit beyond which they

may not be pushed.”188 Consequently we dare not do unto others what we would

not have others do unto us. This limit of human endurance holds for others as

well as for ourselves and so declares the common nature of us all.

4.2 Human Nature and the Human Condition

As long as there is human consciousness in the world, there will always be

subjectivity. And with this subjectivity it becomes impossible to establish and

maintain absolute and permanent modes of authority. Human existence is

bounded by mortality and situated within the history of the world. Arendt states,

that “the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature”

because it is highly unlikely that we, “who can know, determine, and define the

natural essence of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be

187 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 98. 188 Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 302.

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able to do the same for ourselves – this would be like jumping over our own

shadows.”189 Sartre likewise declares that man has no other nature than the one he

has made, building up his own essence which is preceded by his existence. He

denies that man’s essence precedes his historical existence, writing that “man as

the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is

nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of

himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a

conception of it.”190

Killinger claims, that in rejecting the concept of human nature, Sartre is

lead to declare that “man is freedom” because of his openness to possibilities for

the future through his indeterminate potentiality. Existentialism tries to return

man to himself as freedom, because it insists that “existence precedes essence.

Because man can choose, within the limits of his finitude, how he shall live, his

existence occurs before his essence is determined.”191 As an existentialist, Sartre

is dedicated to the reawakening of the individual consciousness and the innate

freedom of man. If existence really does precede essence, then “there is no

explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other

words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”192 But his freedom

does not come cheaply. The possibility of becoming gives a greater dignity to

man, but it also brings an individual responsibility for each choice and ultimately

for all men.

189 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 10. 190 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 27-28. 191 J. Killinger (May, 1961), Existentialism and Human Freedom, The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 5, p. 304. 192 Ibid., p. 313.

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Absolute responsibility for Sartre, means saying that “I am thus

responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man

as I would have him be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.”193 The existential

man is thereby ‘condemned to be free.’194 This new freedom, for which man alone

is responsible for defining, is a terrifying freedom. Many people would rather

live life as an object, than face the consequences of self-determinism, because

there is nowhere to hide from responsibility and no absolute to secure the voice

of man. Existentialism denies that the individual values which we posit by our

evaluations are determined by essences or general norms existing before those

values. In this way, Existentialism denies the existence of a transcendent absolute

above and beyond the world.

For Sartre, freedom is “the only foundation of values, and nothing,

absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this value rather than that, this

hierarchy of values rather than another.”195 The values emerging in the course of

history are the only values in the world. There is no supra-historical value

allowing us to judge these historical values. Stern reinforces this view of freedom

by stating that likewise, there is no human nature if there is no God to conceive

it. Thus, “man is nothing but what he makes himself in the course of history. If

there is no human nature hovering above history as a supra-temporal essence,

then there is no universal man, no archetype-man who could serve as a standard

by which to judge the different types of men emerging in the course of

history.”196 This activity of making ourselves through history, without any

193 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 30. 194 Ibid., p. 34. 195 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 177. 196 Ibid., p. 177.

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reliance on previous standards, gives us a sense of unlimited freedom. What is

needed then is a concept of freedom which is limited to the World

4.3 Limited Freedom

For Arendt, freedom is conceived in the world “not as an inner human

disposition but as a character of human existence in the world.” Therefore, man

does not possess freedom, but rather “his coming into the world, is equated with

the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning

and was so created after the universe had already come into existence.”197

However in the case of the human condition, there is forever a ‘necessity which

prevents us from doing what we know or will’, which arises from the world,

from our own bodies, and is ‘bestowed upon man by birth.’198 Therefore, we are

constantly trying to get beyond this necessity and this struggle constitutes the

whole of human history.

The nihilist erroneously concludes that if God is dead, everything is

permitted because no values can be affirmed outside the realm of the

transcendent. But Willhoite shows that the absence of an eternal law does not

mean that there is no law of any kind, because “if nothing is prohibited eternally,

neither is anything permitted apart from human denial or permission. No liberty

is possible except in a world where both the permitted and the prohibited are

defined.”199 To have unbridled freedom would be to suffer a new form of anguish

and a new form of happiness. Camus says, that “from the moment that man

197 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 165-6. 198 Ibid., p. 158. 199 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 106.

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believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes responsible for

everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer

from life.” Freedom of the mind is not a comfort but an achievement. There is a

great risk in wanting to consider oneself above the law. That is why the mind

only finds “its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations.” 200

Freedom for Camus, can only exist in a world where “what is possible is

defined at the same time as what is not possible.”201 Camus reasons that although

it is not possible to define human existence in terms of objective or

transcendental values, this does not justify nihilist reasoning that anything is

possible, but on the contrary, it “leads to a respect for human dignity and limited

freedom.”202 Absolute liberty, which is the aim of rebellion, eventually becomes a

prison of absolute duties and collective asceticism. If the world is without a

higher order and nothing is therefore true, then nothing is forbidden because in

order to prohibit an action there must first be a standard of values. However, this

also means that nothing can be authorised, because there must also be values and

aims in order to choose the correct course of action. Therefore, at the conclusion

of complete liberation Nietzsche chooses complete subordination, because for

him rebellion ends in ascetic renunciation; “If nothing is true, nothing is

permitted.”203

Willhoite shows that for Camus, “Nietzsche’s nihilism implies that man

lives without restraints, except those he places upon himself; that he can re-create

200 Camus, The Rebel, p. 62. 201 Ibid., p. 62. 202 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 579. 203 Camus, The Rebel, p. 63.

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the world in whatever image he desires.”204 Therefore Camus presents, in the

figure of the rebel, an individual of integrity who chooses self-renunciation in the

face of opportunity. Even though the individual inhabits a moral universe in

which everything is permitted, he chooses instead a narrower and more defined

sense of self. Camus sees our existence as a liberating condition, because “not

only does it free us from a transcendent absolute, but it frees us in smaller ways.

For just as we lose our freedom with a transcendent absolute that defines our

purpose, we tend to lose it by thinking in terms of the future. We propose roles

for ourselves and hence limit our freedom by living within these roles.”205

Because of this, Camus imagines a culture freed from all commanding

values and creeds, but which favours inhibition over impulse. For Camus,

genuine character represents an internalisation of limits, a repression of

possibilities in the personality. Therefore it is necessary that the broadening

experience of sympathetic understanding “have limits in order to protect the

capacity of the personality to reject”206 some aspect in order to accept others. One

must maintain fidelity to the limits of the world around us and to the limits of

ourselves. Without the protection of an ascetic discipline, man can resist no

opportunity.

In this Chapter I have shown that the conditions of freedom must be relative,

continual, open, and shared. I have presented the existential claim that we make

ourselves and therefore we have absolute responsibility for our actions and

decisions. Everything is permitted and choice is unlimited in general, but it is

204 Willhoite, Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion, p. 405. 205 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 94. 206 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 96.

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only be accepting new obligations and closing off certain possibilities that we

define the world and make is mean something in particular. As human beings

situated in the world we have a duty to maintain our awareness of our limits and

our place in that world.

Conclusions

The modern conception of freedom; of humans as makers of their own destinies,

is a powerful one. There is a sense of rebelliousness, of pushing up against the

limits. As Isaac puts it; “it is essential for us to know whether men, without the

help of either the eternal or rationalist thought, can unaided create their own

values.” Everything can not be reduced to negation and absurdity. But we must

first “posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has

encountered and what we must take into account.”207 Both Arendt and Camus

arrive at a similar vision of freedom; one which refuses to privilege any form of

human authority.

Without God, man is left with two choices: either seek out a new absolute

and posit his values there, or look to what remains and derive his values from

that. If man chooses the first option, he withdraws from the world even though he

is in it. If he makes history his absolute then he has an absolute of eternal

movement and no way of stabilizing his values. But if man chooses the second

option, he remains faithful to all he has – the world and the conditions of his

207 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11.

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existence. He acknowledges the relativity of his standards both to himself and his

history and in so doing, finds a new limit for freedom in the world.

In this thesis I have asked the question; ‘Is freedom unlimited?’ I have shown

that there is unlimited freedom but that this kind of freedom, without any

recognition of limits, leads ultimately to meaninglessness. I conclude that man

alone as sole creator of his values and purposes, is left with a choice – ignore the

world and choose unlimited freedom or choose a limited freedom and accept life

and its conditions. We are always in the process of becoming and we must define

our existence by what we can and cannot do.

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